New “Listen With Friends” Service Could Propagate Further Dependence on Facebook

The news was revealed earlier Thursday, Jan. 12th, regarding the fact that Facebook will now have a new feature on its 800 millions users site called “Listen With Friends.” As it does sound self explanatory, this real-time music listening feature allows friends to enjoy the experience of listening to music together.

A musical note icon will appear next to the name of the person who is listening to music and what he/she is listening to. As this does sound like an exciting idea to share our musical interests with friends far away, and being able to comment on the songs and upcoming tracks since the process will be done through a chat. Up to 50 users can be in the group chat with a designed DJ, unfortunately the fun ends if the DJ has to leave, meaning you have to start up another chat.

For the people who wants to get in on the action, you must be on either the Spotify or Rdio server in order to do so. This gives people more of a reason to download apps such as Spotify, those who wishes to listen will simply be prompted to install one of the two apps that’s available for the time being. More servers is said to be added in the future, perhaps turntable.fm, since this whole music sharing idea was originally theirs. Turntable.fm is a social media website that has the interactive music sharing by having users join created rooms with a DJ while allowing the users to comment and exchange words via the chat.

Despite this mimic, one of the co-founder Billy Chasen said he’s actually flattered by Facebook’s copy of its similar service stating the following:

“I’m flattered Facebook was inspired by turntable.fm and created a listen together feature,” Chasen said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing how they interpret what social music means as we seem to have different core philosophies about it (such as the importance of discovering new music from strangers and not just friends).”

One thing to keep in mind is Facebook’s effort to keep users rely on its site for social services. Although it may seem harmless to most people about what music they share, but there’s that argument saying you can tell more about a person by their music taste than anything else, so the dilemma might arise regarding the extend to which we allow Facebook to have on our lives.